Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Yesterday morning at 11:30-ish, I was sitting at my desk, diligently working away (or possibly reading the newspaper/surfing the net, who can remember?) when things got a little shaky.

My desk and computer monitor started to vibrate more than a little and my first thought was Man, that plane/helicopter is close! My seven-storey office building is near an airport, so we frequently have small planes and choppers flying just overhead. We're also on a main road with a lot of trucks rumbling past, so a little bit of vibration is nothing unusual. But it only took a second to realise that this was...um, different.

I stood up and looked out the window, thinking that the predicted gale-force winds must be something really freaky, but the tree branches were just waving around in a normal kind of way. Everyone around me was also standing, or peeking over partitions and muttering versions of What the hell is THAT?

It probably lasted for less than ten seconds, but everyone was looking puzzled and/or a bit freaked out. My boss said in a casual kind of way: Huh. Must be a little earthquake, and I realised he was right. So of course, I immediately referred to the best source of current info: Twitter. Sure enough, tweets were coming in from all over Melbourne. Mostly they were variations of WTF?

I did try Geoscience Australia's website, but apparently it had crashed. Typical government service... The newspapers took a good twenty minutes to catch up, but it turns out that yes, we had an earthquake - a 4.4 centred in Korumburra, in South Gippsland. It's about 120km from Melbourne, so we were perfectly safe. In fact, seismic activity is pretty common down that way, which made it all the more funny to see interstate news services talking it up.

The Canberra Times and one of the Brisbane papers were posting headlines making it sound like a huge disaster. "No reports of injuries YET, but we'll keep you updated!" I think they were actually hoping for some collapsed CBD buildings and maybe just a few deaths, to boost sales. I even saw one online news site this morning spouting off about Australia being at increased risk of tsunamis. Give me a break!

Anyway, it made a dull day a little bit interesting. I expect today to be far more boring, and I'm OK with that. :)